Watchmen (1986)
Watchmen is a 1986 alternate history comics title by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
Congress outlawed masked vigilantes years back, and the handful who kept the costume are not handling retirement well. Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and colourist John Higgins ran Watchmen through DC Comics month by month across 1986 and 1987, twelve issues gathered into one volume as soon as the run finished. Moore first pitched the story using Charlton Comics characters DC had recently bought; editor Dick Giordano asked him for original creations instead.
The world turns on that one change. Masked adventurers showed up in the 1930s and never quite left, so Nixon is still president, the Cold War sits closer to the wire, and anyone in a mask works in the dark or not at all. Rorschach keeps the mask and the notebook. Dan Dreiberg's Nite Owl gear sits in a basement. Laurie Juspeczyk took the Silk Spectre name from her mother and resents it. Adrian Veidt sold his. Jon Osterman, the blue physicist the Pentagon calls Doctor Manhattan, can rearrange matter and has trouble caring.
Gibbons draws almost all of it on a nine-panel grid, which slows the eye, lets him rhyme one chapter against another panel for panel, and hides repeating objects in the backgrounds. Higgins colours in flat secondaries, purple and orange on cheap paper, nothing glossy. Every chapter ends in prose: memoir pages, a psychiatric file, an essay on owls, plus a pirate comic running inside the story. Read those pages as part of the book, because Moore wrote them that way.
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A few thoughts on Watchmen
The 2019 Watchmen series follows Moore's method rather than his plot, picking up the same alternate America three decades on and grounding it in Tulsa history. For the comic itself, the two-part animated Watchmen: Chapter I and Chapter II track the panels closely, while Zack Snyder's 2009 film chases the images and the needle drops. Under the Hood stages the in-book memoir as a period television programme, so even the prose appendix has an adaptation.
Off the Watchmen shelf, The Boys runs a similar premise with the satire raised and the sympathy lowered. Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's Transmetropolitan points Moore-scale political anger at a gutter journalist and his city. Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns shared 1986 with this book, and the animated Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2 carries the same ink-black tone.